Weaving together historical events with infamous conspiracy theories, The Empty Glass is a riveting, paranoiac thriller narrated by the young coroner who is among the first on the scene at Marilyn Monroe’s bungalow when the actress is reported dead.

"Haunting, harrowing Hollywood noir at its finest"Megan Abbott, author of DARE ME and THE END OF EVERYTHING

"The Empty Glass comes rampaging out of the gate and keeps on roaring and roistering until the sad, salutary shock of its final pages. After I started, the vivid writing and the presence of the unhappy latter-day Marilyn Monroe kept me reading all the way to the end. I want to tell everyone within the sound of my voice to buy this splendid novel. It's really punchy and really good, and you really should read it."
Peter Straub, award-winning author of In The Night Room

"James Ellroy fans will relish Baker's impressive first novel, a dark paranoid thriller. Barbed prose makes a familiar story fresh, as does the effective use of flashbacks and flash-forwards. Fluent in the noir idiom, Baker maintains the depressing atmospherics throughout."Publisher's Weekly starred review

"J.I. Baker takes a bold run into Cain and DeLillo territory and scores. The Empty Glass is chilled and redolent of a good gin martini, leaving you primed to order another."Barry Gifford, author of Wild at Heart

"It's LA CONFIDENTIAL meets the Bio channel with a little TMZ thrown in for fun."ELLE

"Stylishly written and perfectly paced, The Empty Glass is noir fiction re-imagined for the modern era, a novel that is sharp, smart and breathlessly fast-paced, yet somehow manages to convey the slow burn of an old regret. As such, it marks the auspicious debut of a new voice in American suspense." Thomas H. Cook, Edgar Award-winning author of Taken

"[In The Empty Glass] Baker conjures a suitably paranoid atmosphere and crackling dialogue in this look at the seedy intersection of celebrity, politics, and power."Booklist

"The Empty Glass is riveting, brilliant, and endlessly fascinating. Writing from a wholly original perspective, J.I. Baker has combined the history and myth surrounding one of the most intriguing deaths of last century and created a shocking, unputdownable thriller."Jason Starr, author of The Craving

"J.I Baker has spun a gripping, pulse-pounding conspiracy around an American tragedy. Smart, perfectly atmospheric, and heartbreaking, The Empty Glass will stay with you long after the final page."Andrew Gross, author of 15 Seconds and co-author
of six #1 NYT bestsellers with James Patterson

Who Killed Marilyn?

On August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her Brentwood hacienda. Fifty years later, many disturbing questions remain. Here, the players, the theories, the evidence, the lovers, and the unsolved mysteries surrounding the death of the world’s greatest film star

Death

Three versions of Marilyn Monroe’s untimely end.
Which one do you believe?

Guy Hockett, owner of Westwood Village Mortuary,
and his son, Don, wheeling the dead star from her home.

“Hot Shot” is slang for an injection. Was it possible that Marilyn Monroe, already under the influence of pills and drink, was given some sort of surreptitious shot? And was it given to calm her down or with the intent to kill? No one, of course, knows the answer—not even Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the coroner who performed the autopsy. “I found no needle marks,” he wrote in his 1983 memoir, Coroner, “and so indicated on the body diagram in the autopsy report. But, interestingly, I did find evidence which might have indicated violence—and I also marked that evidence on the diagram.”

What he found was a bruise on Monroe’s lower left back. From deputy coroner Ben Fitzgerald’s confessions in The Empty Glass (Blue Rider Press, 2012): “A bruise is a sign of violence. Its color comes from protein enzymes thrown off by white blood cells that try to contain the damage. Those enzymes change from dark purple to brown to yellow over time. The bruise on Miss Monroe’s left hip was dark purple, which means it probably appeared on the night she died. But it was never explained.”

Noguchi himself admitted that, during his examination of comedian John Belushi’s body in 1982, no puncture mark was initially visible—but, when he squeezed the actor’s arm, a tiny spot of blood appeared where an injection had occurred. What would have happened had he done the same thing to Monroe? Maybe he would have discovered a puncture mark—the remains of a hot shot—hidden in the center of that bruise.

John Miner was the L.A. district attorney in 1962 and, as such, attended the Marilyn Monroe autopsy. He believed a conspiracy was involved in the actress’s death—specifically that she was given a barbiturate-poisoned enema, which would explain why there was no yellow color in the actress’s duodenem, as well as no odor of pear. It would also explain how the actress ended up with 4.5 percent milligrams of barbiturates and 8 percent chloral hydrate in her bloodstream—which would have meant swallowing 50-80 pills—without water, or a water glass. It would also have explained what Coroner Thomas Noguchi called “marked congestion and purplish discoloration” in the actress’s colon.

Just before his death in 2011, Miner claimed that he had heard—and taken notes on—tapes that Dr. Ralph Greenson had made of Marilyn Monroe before her death, telling Playboy: “Peter [Lawford] had enema sex parties at his Malibu house. [In Dr. Greenson’s tapes] [Monroe] refers to one of them, at which she had the interesting experience of allegedly having the Countess Du Barry’s [an infamous Parisian prostitute] equipment used on her.”

Conspiracy

According to the Marilyn Monroe toxicology report, the actress had 4.5 percent milligrams of barbiturates and 8 percent chloral hydrate in her bloodstream, which means she would have had to swallow around 30 to 40 phenobarbital, or Nembutals. And this doesn’t account for the 13 percent phenobarbital the toxicologist, Ralph Abernethy, found in the liver. That added percent means that Monroe would have had to ingest 50, if not 80, pills by mouth. She would also have had to swallow them quickly, since (if given time) the body rejects the poison, vomiting it up—and yet there was no water in the house…and no water glass on the table initially. In the entire history of forensics, no one has ever died with such high blood concentrations of phenobarb and chloral hydrate as a result of oral ingestion.

Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, claimed she’d noticed a light under the actress’s door when she went to bed around ten on the night of the actress’s death. Murray went to bed in her own room, adjacent to Monroe’s; they shared a wall. She woke at midnight and had to go to the bathroom, she said, so she went into the hall. She noticed that the light was still on under the door, and she became alarmed. She tried the door, but it was locked from the inside. She knocked: no answer.

But why would she have gone into the hall to use the bathroom when one was accessible through her room? And the carpet pile in Monroe’s room was so thick and high that it made closing the door difficult. This meant that no light could possibly have escaped underneath. So how did Murray know that Monroe’s light was still on?

No water glass was found in the first inspection of Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom—in fact, the water in her hacienda had been turned off because of renovations. And yet the actress allegedly died by swallowing 50-80 pills. The lack of the glass was noted by Jack Clemmons, the first responding officer, but later pictures clearly showed a water glass on the actress’s bedside table. How did that glass get there?

Initially, Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, claimed she became alarmed when she noticed a light under Monroe’s door around midnight. Despite the fact that Monroe was a chronic insomniac—midnight was hardly late for her—Murray claims she panicked, and called…not the police but rather Monroe’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson.

When Greenson arrived at the hacienda, he, too, found Monroe’s bedroom door locked. He went outside, looked through the bedroom window, and saw the actress lying nude on the bed under rumpled bedclothes. She looked “peculiar,” he said. He broke the window with a poker from the living-room fireplace and climbed inside. She was clutching the phone. “She must have been calling for help,” said Greenson, who later called the actress’s physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg.

But why would Monroe have been calling for help when she knew the housekeeper was right next door? Even stranger, Murray, Greenson, and Engelberg didn’t call the cops until 4:35 a.m. When asked why, they said they had to get permission from the publicity department at 20th Century Fox, where Monroe was making her last film, Something’s Got to Give.

The whole scenario was upended the following morning, when the L.A. Times reported that all the players had mysteriously changed their stories—specifically the time:

Mrs. Monroe’s body was discovered after her housekeeper and companion, Mrs. Eunice Murray, awoke about 3 a.m. and saw a light still burning in the actress’ room.
But the bedroom door was locked. She was unable to arouse [sic] Miss Monroe by shouts and rapping on the door, and immediately telephoned Miss Monroe’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson.
Dr. Greenson took a poker from the fireplace, smashed in a window, and climbed into the Monroe bedroom. He took the telephone from her hand and told Mrs. Murray, "She appears to be dead."
He called Dr. Hyman Engelberg, who had prescribed the sleeping pills, and pronounced her dead on his arrival at the house a short time later.
Dr. Engelberg called police at 4:20 a.m. and two officers arrived in five minutes.

From Thomas Noguchi’s memoir, Coroner: “On [the morning of Monroe’s death] I discovered something strange. [Chief Coroner] Dr. Curphey had telephoned the office early to leave me a message. The note on my desk read, ‘Dr. Curphey wants Dr. Noguchi to do the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe.’ A more senior medical examiner would normally have performed the autopsy. And yet Dr Curphey had made a unique call on a Sunday morning assigning me to the job.”

In his autopsy report, coroner Thomas Noguchi noted “dual lividity” on the body of Marilyn Monroe. What does this mean? Livor mortis happens during the first eight hours after death. When the heart stops pumping, red blood cells settle in the lower portion of the body, so that if the body is on its left side, the lividity—a purplish spotting—appears at the bottom of that side. If livor mortis is present on both sides, it’s called “dual lividity.” In Monroe’s case, livor mortis was found on both the back and front of the arms and legs. Which could indicate that the body had been moved.

If you ingest more than 12 capsules of barbiturates, refractile crystals will appear in the digestive tract or in the stomach. In his autopsy report, coroner Thomas Noguchi noted: “A smear made from the gastric contents examined under the polarized microscope shows no refractile crystals.”

The smell of pear is characteristic of a chloral hydrate overdose (which is part of what caused Marilyn Monroe’s death) when chloral hydrate is taken by mouth. But the smell wasn’t apparent during the autopsy—another reason to believe that Monroe did not swallow the pills. How, then, were the drugs introduced to her body?

In Marilyn Monroe’s duodenum, the first digestive tract after the stomach, there was “no evidence,” coroner Thomas Noguchi wrote in his report, “of pills. No residue. No coloration.” But Nembutals are called “yellow jackets” because of their distinctive yellow color; it’s virtually inconceivable that she would or could have swallowed 50 to 80 “yellow jackets” without leaving a tell-tale stain in the duodenum.

Ralph Abernethy, the chief toxicologist, delivered analyses on Marilyn Monroe’s blood and liver, but in his autopsy report coroner Thomas Noguchi had requested analyses on the kidney, stomach, urine, and intestines as well—because the analyses of all these organs would show exactly how barbiturates had entered the system. Without specimen analysis, there’s no way of telling how the pills were ingested.

But Abernethy did not deliver analyses on the kidney, stomach, urine or intestines because, he said, it was “obviously a suicide.” (That was clearly not his call to make.) Strangest of all, the tissue samples that were sent to be analyzed “disappeared” from Abernethy’s lab at UCLA. “In the entire history of the L.A. county coroner’s office,” then-DA John Miner said, “there has never been a[n] instance of organ samples vanishing.”

Most of the people who were at Marilyn Monroe’s Brentwood hacienda late at night on August 4 and/or in the early morning hours of August 5—her housekeeper, Eunice Murray; her publicist, Pat Newcomb; her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson; and her physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg—mysteriously took “vacations” in the wake of the death.

“The morning after [Marilyn Monroe’s] death,” reporter Joe Hyams is quoted in Anthony Summers’s Goddess, “I contacted a telephone company employee and asked him to copy for me the list of numbers on her tape—a service he was willing to provide for a fee. Within the hour my contact called me back from a pay phone. ‘All hell has broken loose down here,’ he told me. ‘Apparently you’re not the only one interested in Marilyn’s calls. The tape’s disappeared.’ I’m told it was impounded by the Secret Service—I’ve never before heard of the government getting in on the act. Obviously somebody high up ordered it.”

Monroe’s phone records from June and July, which had already been processed and therefore couldn’t be removed from the records, showed a number of calls made to RE7-8200, the number of the Justice Department in Washington, DC.

Many people have claimed that Attorney General Bobby Kennedy couldn’t possibly have been in Los Angeles on August 4 and August 5, the night and/or early morning of Marilyn Monroe’s death. In fact, he had been scheduled to speak at the American Bar Association Conference on Monday, August 6, so he spent the weekend with his wife, Ethel, and kids at the Bates Ranch in Gilroy, 300 miles northwest of Los Angeles. On Saturday, Monroe’s last day, everyone went horseback riding.

On Sunday, Bobby attended mass at 9:30 a.m. in Gilroy. “He was without his usual flashy smile and shook hands woodenly with those that welcomed him,” one paper said. “Perhaps the cares of the administration are weighing heavily on him.”

Perhaps. But pages from flight logs at Conners helicopter at Clover Field in Santa Monica showed the record of two helicopter flights on the afternoon before and night of Monroe’s death. The first, from San Francisco, had landed at 1:16 p.m. on August 4 at Stage 18 of the 20th Century Fox lot near the Beverly Hilton. The second had flown out of Santa Monica just after midnight on August 5, heading to San Francisco.

So what does this mean?

It means that Bobby could have left Gilroy on Saturday, flying from San Francisco to the Fox lot after lunch and then heading to see Monroe. It means he could have returned to Gilroy in time for prayers on Sunday. But Monroe was found dead after midnight. Why did the second flight leave L.A. for San Francisco almost 12 hours after the first flight arrived? Maybe Bobby didn’t get what he wanted from Monroe in the afternoon. So maybe he returned to her house that night—perhaps with Dr. Ralph Greenson, perhaps with Peter Lawford.

In a 1985 BBC interview, Monroe housekeeper Eunice Murray finally dropped the defenses that she, like Lawford, had maintained throughout her life and said, “Why, at my age, do I still have to cover this thing?” She went on to say that Bobby had been in the Brentwood hacienda on the day Monroe died and that a doctor and an ambulance had come while Monroe was still alive.

Marilyn's L.A.

Click on a pin to explore the starlet’s City of Angels

Ciro’s nightclub

This is where Ben Fitzgerald (the deputy coroner at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s who claimed to have found Marilyn Monroe’s secret diary) claims, in The Empty Glass (Blue Rider Press, 2012), that he met up with both Jo Carnahanand Jeanne Carmen, the actress who claimed she’d received a phone call from Marilyn Monroe on the last night of the troubled star’s life.

Santa Anita Park

This racetrack is where Ben Fitzgerald (the deputy coroner at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s who claimed to have found Marilyn Monroe’s secret diary) wound up in a showdown with the Mob and the LAPD.

Joe’s Bar

This long-lost place has only a tangential connection to the Marilyn Monroe death, insofar as it was a favored spot of Ben Fitzgerald, the Wild Turkey-loving deputy coroner at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s who claimed to have found Marilyn Monroe’s secret diary. Other than the fact that it was located (per Fitzgerald’s confessions in The Empty Glass, Blue Rider Press, 2012) near a “blue tamale place” on Melrose, no one can ascretain where it is, though some historians place it here.

Verona Gardens

Once a nightclub frequented by honeymooners and later by lowlives like Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, who allegedly stopped here on the last night of her life, it was converted into an apartment building in the late 1950s. Johnny Roselli lived here for a brief period with Los Angeles County Coroner deputy coroner Ben Fitzgerald’s estranged wife, Rose, and their son, Max. According to Fitzgerald’s confessions in The Empty Glass (Blue Rider Press, 2012), Roselli was extorting his wife sexually.

The Savoy

The notorious Savoy was once the residence of Ben Fitzgerald (the deputy coroner who controversially claimed to have discovered the missing diary of Marilyn Monroe) from some unidentified point in 1962 to his mysterious disappearance in October of the same year. The hotel was once a playground for Hollywood’s celluloid set, back when mid-Wilshire was the Center of the Film World. But after a few suspicious fires in the 1940s—in addition to the fact that room 4E was for six months the residence of the infamous serial killer Art Barker, who hid mementos from his victims in the walls—the Savoy went from a palace to a sad place that traded in human remnants, pornographic pictures, and flagons of ether and laudanum. By the early 1960s, it had become a home for vagrants, down-on-their-luck starlets, welfare cases, the penniless elderly, and the insane.

Old Hall of Justice

This building, where Ben Fitzgerald worked as a deputy coroner under Coroner Theodore Curphey when Marilyn Monroe was found dead in Brentwood in 1962, is currently empty, having been irreparably damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. But the LA County Coroner’s office, where Monroe was autopsied, was once located in its basement. It was so dank and dark that it was commonly known as “pneumonia hall,” and the administration was so lax and incompetent, if not criminal, that the bodies of “unimportant” people were often just stacked in the Fallout Shelter, where they rotted among the rats.

Westwood Village Mortuary

A quiet, eerie oasis in the middle of the city, this is where Marilyn Monroe lies buried not far from Truman Capote and Dean Martin—both of whom were friends of the actress. Natalie Wood, Roy Orbison, Walter Matthau and many others are buried here, too. (Frank Zappa’s grave is the unmarked No. 100.) The director Billy Wilder is buried close to his frequent star, Jack Lemmon, and both have put jokes on their gravestones: Wilder’s says “I’m a writer, but then nobody’s perfect,” and Lemmon’s reads “Jack Lemmon in….”

Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica Beach House

The former Louis B. Mayer mansion was purchased by actor Peter Lawford and his wife, Patricia, John F. Kennedy‘s sister. (Lawford was known as the Brother-in-Lawford.) It was considered the White House West, because it’s where JFK stayed (and partied—hard) when he came to Los Angeles. Many believe that JFK had sex repeatedly with Marilyn Monroe here, and private investigator Fred Otash said that the sex was taped, thanks to the bugs that were planted in the house. This is probably also where Monroe first met Bobby Kennedy.

Villa Nova

Now the Rainbow Bar and Grill, this is where Marilyn Monroe had her first (blind) date with Joe DiMaggio in 1952.

12305 Fifth Helena Drive

This is the location of the modest Brentwood hacienda that Marilyn Monroe bought (and furnished with many things she had purchased on a trip to Taxco, Mexico) only sixth months before she died in the bedroom. A tile just outside the front window reads “Cursum Perficio,” meaning “I have completed my journey.”

882 North Doheny Drive

Thisis a triplex on the corner of Cynthia Street. Sinatra’s accountant managed the place, which is why the singer’s secretary lived there. Marilyn herself first lived at Doheny before she married DiMaggio. She moved back after divorcing Arthur Miller. She stayed there, a kind of waystation, on her way to the permanent digs—as permanent as her digs would ever be. She died only six months after moving to Brentwood.

Cal-Neva Lodge

This place, half in California and half in Nevada, was once a mobbed-up haunt of the rich and famous and is now but a pale shadow of its former self. As of this writing, even the gambling has been eliminated, and the place itself is falling apart, though you can still take tours of the tunnels underneath the complex.

On the last weekend of her life, Marilyn Monroe was brought to the Cal-Neva by its infamous co-owner, Frank Sinatra, ostensibly to celebrate the renewal of her contract with 20th Century Fox. But the agenda may have been more sinister: The actress was by all accounts drugged and drunk the entire weekend, and the photographer Billy Woodfield later claimed that Sinatra brought him a roll of film to be developed. He claims the photos, when developed, showed the actress bombed and wallowing on the floor of Chalet 52, where she was staying. Some sources suggest that the Chicago Mob’s Sam Giancana was involved and may even have been shown in the photos.

Bel-Air Hotel

This is where the so-called “Last Sitting,” a series of photographs by Bert Stern for Vogue, was shot just weeks before Marilyn Monroe’s death.

Formosa Café

This hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant, adjacent to the Goldwyn studios, was where Monroe ate while shooting Some Like It Hot.

Canter’s Deli

Marilyn Monroe used to hang out at this New York-style delicatessen with her third husband, Arthur Miller.

Players

Some were suspects (Bobby Kennedy, the Chicago Mob); others were mere bystanders.
A look at the people who filled Marilyn’s tormented last days.

Unsolved Mysteries

Many people (Fred Otash included) claim that a number of tapes were made of Marilyn Monroe—beginning with tapes of her having sex with President John F. Kennedy at Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house and ending with a tape made of what might have happened with Bobby Kennedy in her Brentwood hacienda on the night of her death. “A number of surveillance experts—among them Otash and Bernard Spindel’s aide Earl Jaycox—have stated that they listened to some of the tapes made at Monroe’s home, including one recorded on the day she died,” Donald Spoto wrote in The Man Who Kept the Secrets, his biography of Lawford. “Their accounts of what is contained on the tapes are remarkably similar.”

The accounts include reports of the “echoey” sounds of Monroe and Bobby arguing about something that had been “promised” by Bobby and Monroe demanding an explanation of why he wouldn’t marry her. Bobby kept asking, “Where is it? Where the fuck is it?” Then there was a door slam and, later, the sound of three voices: Kennedy’s, Monroe’s, and Lawford’s. “We have to know,” Bobby said. “It’s important to the family. We can make any arrangements you want, but we must find it.” Kennedy was screaming, and Monroe was ordering them out of the house. Then there were (one source said) “thumping, bumping sounds, then muffled, calming sounds. It was as though she were being put on the bed.”

Many people, including LA County Coroner’s Office Deputy Coroner Ben Fitzgerald, claim to have seen a diary written by Marilyn Monroe that later disappeared from evidence at LACCO. Author Robert Slatzer, a friend of Monroe’s, claimed the diary included references to Cuba, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Kennedy brothers’ war on Jimmy Hoffa.

Is this what Bobby Kennedy was screaming about when he was heard on the death tape allegedly saying, “We have to find it. It’s important to the family”? Is this what he was looking for when he allegedly returned to the Monroe hacienda on the day and night of her death? Is this what Monroe’s publicist Pat Newcomb (see photo at left) was so furiously searching for on the morning of August 5, the reason why the police had to force her from the house?

According to Dr. Ralph Greenson’s children, something mysterious happened on this weekend that plunged Marilyn Monroe into despair. “What it was nobody really knows,” said Henry Weinstein, the producer of Monroe’s last, unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give. “I mean, people do know. I think the only one who knows for sure is [Monroe's publicist] Pat Newcomb.” Some speculate that Monroe was pregnant—more than anything else in life, she wanted a child—and that she had had an abortion. If that’s true, who was the father?

On July 28 and 29, the penultimate weekend of Marilyn Monroe’s life, Frank Sinatra was performing at the Cal-Neva Lodge (see photo), located half in California and half in Nevada (the Nevada half—this was the gimmick—featured gambling). What happened that weekend is shrouded in mystery, but Monroe was by all accounts drunk and stoned throughout, and photographer Billy Woodfield, who often did work for Sinatra, claimed to the end of his life that Sinatra brought him pictures that were taken in Chalet 52, where Monroe was staying.

“Woodfield stated that when Sinatra returned from Cal-Neva, he brought Woodfield a roll of film to be developed,” Donald Wolfe wrote in The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe. “In his darkroom, the photographer was shocked to see that the photographs were of an unconscious Marilyn being sexually abused in the presence of mob boss Sam Giancana and Sinatra. Marilyn had been drugged…When Sinatra was given the negatives and prints, Woodfield suggested that Sinatra burn them, but the pictures were intended to insure Marilyn’s silence.”

On the last day of Marilyn Monroe’s life, author Anthony Summers wrote in Goddess, “a messenger arrived with a package. Marilyn opened it and walked out to the pool carrying its contents—a stuffed toy tiger. She then sat down by the pool, holding the tiger and saying nothing. [She seemed terribly depressed] but did not say why. Photographs of the back of Marilyn’s house, taken the next day [see photo at left], showed two stuffed animals lying by the pool. One of them could be a tiger. Had some devastating note arrived with the tiger or—curious thought—was the tiger itself the message? Marilyn, at all events, now lost control.”